One of 24 Metaverse
Summit question-answer sets:Ethan
Zuckerman shares his thoughts on the
networked future

This page contains one of a set of 24
transcripts including remarks made by interview
participants at the Metaverse Roadmap Summit at
Stanford Research Institute in May 2006. Each person
was asked a series of five questions regarding the
future; only the most "telling" responses
were transferred from the recordings into these
transcripts, thus, some of these interviews will
include five question-answer sets, some will have four
or fewer.

To jump to another
interviewee's set of answers, click on the
person's name below.

Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at Harvard
University's Berkman Center for Internet and
Society, specializes in ICT development. His work
covers telecom policy, free and open-source
software, and participatory media technologies.
He is a cofounder of Global Voices
(www.globalvoicesonine.org), a community of
citizen journalists. He works with the Open
Society Institute's Information Program. He
founded Geekcorps, a volunteer group that sent
tech experts to work with ICT companies in the
developing world. He is also the former CTO of
Tripod.com.

What is your
greatest fear for the future of networked
technologies? The simple answer is I do
not have a tremendous amount of fear for the
networked future. I do think some of the new
technologies that people are compelling almost to
the point of addictiveness. And I do think that
in the same way that I watched some of my friends
in college drop out of school playing MOOs and
MUDs, we're seeing people drop out of life in
general playing massively multiplayer online
games. While I think that's interesting and a
little troubling I don't think that's the
sort of thing one legislates around. I don't
think you can prevent people from encountering
these things. Instead it's a really
interesting indicator that these games are doing
things and providing things that are missing in
the rest of our society. It's a really
interesting question. I think if we're
finding that people are getting some sort of
social stimulus that they otherwise lack (by
going) online, first of all, at least they're
getting that stimulus. I know a lot of my online
relationships are at least as important as my
offline relationships. But it's also a really
interesting question about what are the social
spaces, what are the constructs that allow people
to interact or not interact with the people who
are physically proximate to them. So, I don't
have a whole lot of fears. I don't
particularly want a positive future in which
we're all locked in, staring at our boxes,
but to the extent that I am locked in staring at
my box, there are many ways in which my life has
gotten better and more interesting. My box
connects me to a lot of interesting people in
really interesting corners of the globe. As long
as this is something that we do, as long as
it's a tool that we use in a larger, full and
complicated life, I don't have a lot of
worries.

What is your most
fervent hope for the future of networked
technologies? My vision has to do with
getting all six-plus billion people on this
planet communicating with one another, and
I'm willing to sacrifice a great deal of the
high end to grab the pervasiveness of networked
technology. I'm not especially interested in
3D spaces, flashy animations, being able to
simulate physics on a computer. What I'm
interested in is the ability to listen to the
stories and the experiences of people all over
the world talking about what's going
on.

Looking out more
than 10 years, what development will have the
greatest impact on society? I get
excited about extremely lightweight clients, the
spread of the mobile phone … how do you
use this not just as a one-on-one device but as a
publishing platform or an interacting platform.
I'm interested in the aggregation of
filtering of content – how do you listen to
six billion voices? Someone's going to have
to help you sort through it. I'm interested
in translation, which is an enormous problem as
we start trying to deal with an internet that is
not a de facto English internet, but also has an
enormous Chinese populations and other language
groups growing rapidly.

What technology
will have the greatest impact on our everyday
lives the next 10 years? (There are) two
that I would love to see happen in the next 10
years - but I'm not sure will happen even in
the next 10 years. One is truly reliable speech
recognition that allows a voice interface to
create content. We have all this enthusiasm about
podcasting right now, and podcasting is very nice
and fun – you can imagine how fun it would
be if I could pick up my cell phone and say a few
words and have a blog post out of it. But right
now you're creating an audio file, and
there's huge problems with those – you
want a text transcript for searchability and for
translation. The other big one, as I mentioned
before is translation – really good machine
translation, to the point where I can pick up my
phone and I can talk to my friend Isaac and he
can speak Mandarin and I can speak English and
we're unaware of the language the other is
speaking because it's being seamlessly
translated and it appears in that other
person's voice. That's the sort of
miracle-type scenario that would have an enormous
social impact – just absolutely enormous.
The ability for people in countries that we
don't know about and don't pay attention
to to report their own news and call attention to
situations, if they could make the news they
needed and in the language that they spoke would
be tremendously important.

What do you think
policymakers should do to ensure a positive
future for networked technologies? The
most important thing toward a positive networked
future is network neutrality. It's
essentially ensuring that the networks we use are
capable of carrying whatever sort of content
people can invent. There's a real push right
now to essentially allow companies to prefer one
type of content over another. The first content
we're likely to see this on is voice-over-IP
traffic. Generally, networks run by phone
companies, which may be running their own phone
services, don't typically want to carry Skype
phone calls or Vonage phone calls – and
we're already seeing, in Canada a network
essential degrade the traffic of Vonage. This
ends up being an enormous problem for anyone
trying to innovate on the internet. If you allow
a network to say, "OK, I'll sell you
internet access, but I'm going to optimize it
for my services and those services include video
streaming and e-mail but not virtual
worlds," for instance, and then someone
comes along and virtual worlds suddenly become
very important, you have a whole set of people
who are functionally cut off from that corner of
the net. What's worked so well about the net
so far is we're all on the same internet. You
make the decision of what provider you go with,
but ultimately you're going to get the same
bits. That's now under threat. And that's
an enormous danger that policymakers should be
considering seriously.